Playing next to John Scofield every night is a lesson—to say the least. One technique Sco recently showed me was how to expand my comping in modal situations. The basic idea is to play quartal voicings where the top note is diatonic and the bottom notes shift chromatically. Your ear hears the main tonality of a given key but the lower notes create tension and resolution.

Quartal voicings are simply chords built by stacking intervals of a fourth (rather that a third). They have a very open and neutral quality, since there are no thirds to define a major (3) or minor (b3) harmony. Ex. 1 demonstrates how to create quartal voicings over the D minor pentatonic scale (D-F-G-A-C). To help establish the root, I play a D pedal in the audio example.

A common way guitarists create harmonic tension is by approaching chords from a half-step away. Ex. 2 is the same D minor (or F major) pentatonic chord scale as Ex. 1, but each chord is approached by a half-step below. Parallel motion is a useful musical technique, but the sound is very “guitaristic.” That’s because compared to playing chromatic harmony on a keyboard, it’s easy to maintain a chord grip on the fretboard and move it up and down the neck. Remember: Shifting a chord shape one fret away also creates more dissonance than you might want.

Here’s an easy way to maintain ear-friendly diatonic tonality while still retaining tension: Use the top note as an anchor and approach the lower two notes with the half-step method we discussed earlier. Let’s stay with the D minor pentatonic sound for Ex. 3.

Simply changing the pedal tone also affects the overall tonality. In Ex. 4 the pedal note is now an F (instead of D). Try panning the audio track hard right and playing a different bass note—perhaps a G or a Bb—along with the audio example.

Of course, anything you practice going up a scale you should also practice descending. In Ex. 5 we remain in the D minor pentatonic realm with a descending figure that also features non-diatonic intervals.

Avi Bortnick plays rhythm guitar and electronics in the John Scofield Band, and is the creator of the Time Guru metronome iOS/Android app. He lives and gigs in the New York area, performing with Jim Weider’s Project Percolator, Rene Lopez, Jihae, Bunga Bunga Party and others. He can be reached at www.avibortnick.net or http://www.facebook.com/AviBortnickGuitar.

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